OMO ONILE

The leaves rustled in the wind and the earth felt cold beneath our bare feet. I and Akinlolu who was my uncle even though I was a year older than him lurked in the thicket armed with our cutlasses. We stood waiting for them.

Our family tree was a rather complicated one. The main stem had 7 branches which broke out in a confused entanglement of trellised family ties. Those seven branches each had a family head that often represented the interest of the family.

Scenes from the video played itself in my head and swelled it: causing me to go dizzy with rage. Our elders had sold us out.
I could picture again the smiling face of Baba Adekola as he signed the papers. He was the family head from our branch and I had seen him chewing his tobacco and laughing aloud, slapping his belly to add beat to the cacophony. I saw other faces too- faces of uncles and grand relatives: all old men at the ebb of their tide taking thirty parts from the twenty they owed the generations after them. It had been someone’s mistake that we saw the videos documenting the land sale but how long could the hare have run to avoid the scope of the patient hunter? One day he will be found.

My father was very old and the only thing which he owned; the only thing which he passed on to us; the only thing which we owned; and the only thing we intended to pass on to our children was the land that stood as part of the overall family holding. It was where I and my uncle were hiding presently.
He owned a portion of it like I did even though his father had died without an inheritance and my father had been grateful to cede some of our land to him as he had lived with us all his life. He grew cassava while I grew cocoa: cocoa that I and my family cropped from the pods in harvest time and spread it out on the concrete of the courtyard to dry. We would sit around it, my children would dance around it and I would watch it in the night to protect it from prying eyes and cursed hands of lazy men around the village who stole for a living. Cocoa was our sustenance.
I did no other job neither did my wife nor the six children we had between us.

Now, the cocoa, the land, our inheritance; everything was gone. One day we had gone to the farm to find it no more. ‘The government had acquired it’, was the response we got from our fathers but the video had said otherwise.

I watched from the thicket, the place that had once been my cocoa farm and sweat trickled down my bush strewn face stinging me in the eyes and stinging me with the thought that my hope had died with the greed of Baba Adekola- his smile hurting me the more anytime I thought of those images on the screen of my mind. They had sold the family land: All of it, to the visitors; and years of hard work, years of hope; had gone under the blades of the bulldozers revealing the earth beneath. A poor reminder of where we will all end up.

The noise of the truck brought I and my uncle to an alert as we watched the approaching glare from the shade. Our ears strained for the drone that began to draw closer and my grip firmed on the cutlass I held in my left hand. We had dealt with our elders one after another. Now it was the turn of the visitors who dared to enter a stranger’s house feet first.

The drone steadily neared as the tyres, crunching the earth beneath, chewed faster towards us. Finally the truck came to a halt not far from where we hid. It was white and its windscreen reflected the glare in our direction causing us to shield our eyes even in the shade.

The first man to come down looked familiar from the videos. He was the one with the big frame and a bald head and a jowl that quivered like that of a rabid dog when he spoke. He lumbered his bulk out of the vehicle and brought out a cigarette from his chest pocket, wincing in the sun and searching his pockets for a light. His shirt was sweaty and his pate shiny from the sun in the eye of his bald patch. His jowl was quivering as he spoke to some others who were still in the car whom we did not see. Soon after, another man came of the rear of the vehicle then yet another man. My uncle and I, quiet like the patient hunter we were, waited for the grass cutters to sit still.

Waiting was a part of our lives. We knew how to be patient.
In the dry season we planted and we waited.
While we soaked our cassava in water to make fufu for our families we waited.
When the cocoa was ripe, we clawed out the milky seeds, spread it to dry and waited.
At the cocoa merchants, as we bagged our beans in line, we waited.
When our monies came in, we stored it in bags beneath the earth and waited.
When our game ran, we stood still and waited.
We were a waiting people but we don’t wait forever.

I watched my uncle pick a rock from the sod about our feet, his cutlass having changed hands already.

The first stone whizzed through the air and hit the fat one square on the face.
The rest was history that blurred into one moment of flight and fury as the men scampered in the fray. I ran with bile in my veins hacking down the intruders with the thirsty cutlass I wielded- they whimpered like chickens. The driver who unfortunately was in the truck as we approached had sped off to be our tale-bearer to the rest. We chased him but could not reach him as the car sped off leaving a trailing cloud of dust the fleeing letters on his boot that read.

M I S N A R Y